Don Imus has been fired from MSNBC. The simulcast of his radio show will be replaced with live news programming.
This is the culmination of a week’s worth of controversy, stemming from comments made a week ago tonight about the Rutgers’ women’s college basketball team.
Nobody will cry over Don Imus, and nobody should. However, one question begs to be asked. What about the rest? Keith Olbermann alluded to this on his MSNBC program; where is the ire for the other racist, sexist remarks that are ubiquitous across all media?
If Don Imus had not referred to the women of Rutgers as “nappy-headed whores”, but instead called them ‘butch’ or ‘lesbians’ or flat-out referred to them as men, his comment would have been largely ignored. Insulting female athletes is a norm in this country, and not one eyebrow would have been raised across the national media spectrum.
When people of Imus’ demographic refer to the young, black, male athletes of the NBA as gangbangers, thugs and worse, not one eyebrow is raised. It, too, is viewed as normal. After all, when black male athletes are not sexually assaulting white women or causing ‘riots’ in Las Vegas, they are holding up convenience stores and having gunfights in the streets. Just like all black men.
That disgusting, popular perception aside, there have been so many inappropriate, heinous comments over the past several years that have gone unnoticed, one wonders why this particular remark managed to get the kind of publicity it did, and get a man who has been on radio for 35 years fired.
When hockey and baseball broadcaster Gary Thorne remarked that the NBA was this nation’s most “expensive and dangerous gang”, he did so with no discipline from ESPN.
When Imus in the Morning participant Sid Rosenberg claimed that one would be more likely to see Venus and Serena Williams in National Geographic than in Playboy, he was disciplined. But as video of Imus’ most recent controversial remark shows, he was back on the air before long.
When a writer for the Huffington Post, a liberal blog, remarked that NBA players are “mean, arrogant, scary looking, tattooed, prison inmates” who “often come off sounding like Pogo“, he was craven enough to remove the post from his own personal blog — but faced no discipline from a website that today hypocritically criticizes the racist stylings of Don Imus.
One could write an epic novel of the racist comments made within the past year alone. But that is not the point of this post. The point here is that Don Imus is not alone. Many of the people bashing Don Imus are not clean themselves. And unlike Don Imus, Thorne and Ken Levine did not make their comments as asides. They thought their comments out, and in the case of Thorne and Levine, wrote them into articles published for the world to see.
How is Imus worse than Thorne? How is an ill-conceived off-hand comment worse than labeling an entire league as a “dangerous gang” simply because the predominant race of players in said league is African American?
How is Imus worse than Levine, who wrote a purely racist screed filled with the kind of hateful speech that not even Rush Limbaugh would dare to voice?
The fact is, he is not. He simply has a larger platform. And while idealists like Vivian C. Stringer or Jesse Jackson imagine that the racially-tinged comments of Imus and Michael Richards will start a dialogue that eventually leads to less ignorance, the truth is that nobody will learn anything from this situation.
There have been people saying worse things than Don Imus. Those people have said these things in the past, are saying them presently, and will say them in the future. They will face no backlash, will lose no sponsors, and will lose no national presence. Imus has become a scapegoat, as Michael Richards and Mel Gibson before him. He will be blamed for all racism and promptly flogged, as mainstream America engages in the type of mass self-flagellation that makes television executives wish this were the sweeps month of May instead of April.
And then nothing will be said the next time some sportswriter refers to the NBA as a league of gangmembers and thugs. Nothing will be said the next time a chauvinist launches an unprovoked attack on women’s sports — not for any action taken by said sport, but simply because it exists. All the cultural critics will lie mum, even as the racism and sexism continues — not in the obscurity and privacy of American homes, but across all media.
Should there be protests? No. Then the reaction becomes disingenuous, an exercise in the “hey, look at me” type of social commentary that several have mastered. However, to pick and choose what becomes offensive and to then sacrifice the offender seems ludicrous. Don Imus is not the worst of the bigots, not even close. He is merely the tip of the iceberg.
